"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
10-29-2019, 11:40 PM (This post was last modified: 10-29-2019, 11:41 PM by Narcisa.)
She is of the old blood of Beqanna. All made up of the dust of deserts and the sweat of jungle heat. Created out of the nobodies and nothings of a time long ago. But time is mercurial here where immortals roam and the dead often cross back into mortality. There are many here who lived during the time of her grandparents without having aged enough to tell them from the newly born.
Blood is rather thin to an orphan (ancient or not).
Narcisa, pale as alabaster and softer than the belly of a newborn hare, does not think much of blood as she slips through moonlit trees. She revels in the night. The obscurity of darkness that hinders most leans to favor Narcisa’s moon eyes. To her, the darkness is nothing. However, one barely needs the sense of sight to capture a creature as brilliantly pale as she. Bathed in shadow though she may be, the darkness it would take to drown her is not measured tonight.
The rush of water over rocks calls thirst to her lips. She ventures from the trees to the edge of the racing water. Moonlight dresses her fully as she lowers her lips to the frigid surface. How she glows like bone picked clean.
i found the antidote. i let the anger go and mother nature found it's place. now we're compatible, my inner animal, i wanted blood and got a taste.
Insomuch the interest he held, Nodens was a bizarre thing: a drifting creature whose manifestation altered and changed at will. Akin to breathing he rippled and shivered, the flesh on his body warping and the bones crunchy with wet snaps and popping sounds… muscles bulging and contracting and the breathing stopped as the fur elongated over his body and darkened entirely. Painted an abyssal black the coarse guard hairs hid a grey-mixed undercoat, and his wolfish features seemed larger than the average canine predator: primordial and ancient.
The massive paws left traces on the ground and he carried himself through the brush and trees with his nostrils flaring and scents passing around him. Those black lips pulled back to reveal fangs and sharpened teeth, and the wolfish-golden eyes searched as ears swiveled and his tail flicked behind him with increasing sway as he leaned into turns and movements. Another ripple made his head grow antlers and another brought his legs taller and stilted with cloven hooves and shape like a deer.
A lion’s tail swayed behind him and scales hid in the fur… an amalgamation shape of forms that he has mastered and learned. Patient though, wings formed at his shoulders and he stretched them cautiously… keen to keep them tucked at his back and sides. Pacing as he did he found himself stalled at the sight of the paler creature… at the sight of the starkly whitened woman and her form that seemed both familiar and yet? A strange to him.
Nodens was poignant in how he called out first, studying the ancient mare as the nicker carried between them.
Speaking up as he drew closer, he swept a leg in front of the other and did not hesitate to remain poised and still. “One might wonder what specter you are,” he remarked, playful though not out of place. “Be it banshee, lost soul, or snow given flesh. In regard to your color I mean.” as if to clarify he spoke and paused, the ears twitching forward and his gaze studying her movements and motions… familiar.
Like Yidhra, she seemed out of time and out of the cycle.
“I am Nodens.” he stated without care for the quickness of introduction. “Please pardon my interruption, not everyday I encounter someone who seems very interesting.”
10-31-2019, 12:23 AM (This post was last modified: 10-31-2019, 12:23 AM by Narcisa.)
Does he look at her as the wolf does prey? Wide eyed in the shine of the moon. The clamor of the river over the rocks deadens the sound of his downwind approach. He calls to her - clearly equine in voice - but when she sets her sights upon him, she is startled by the curiosity that floods her.
Antlers, wings, leonine tail, and those golden, predatory eyes - an aggregation of many creatures into one.
Narcisa dips her head in greeting, admitting him into her presence with a delicate simper upon her lips. She listens carefully to his voice as it mingles with the frothy rapids at their feet. She is, perhaps, as he says: a spectre of white come to float betwixt the trees and old stones. She has drifted for so long - banished and desolate.
“Nor I.” she returns in a voice that almost sounds like many. And it is true: she has never seen anything quite as curious as the creature that stands before her. Her pupiless eyes trail the length of his antlers down to his eyes, allowing a brief silence to mingle between them. “I am Narcisa.” She steps closer, appraising him as the antelope does the lion - unsure of whether to balk or to satisfy her curiosity.
“What god created you?” she asks, venturing to touch the fur of his shoulder as if to test his tangibility.
i found the antidote. i let the anger go and mother nature found it's place. now we're compatible, my inner animal, i wanted blood and got a taste.
It is a question that manifests a shock in him, a wideness of his eyes and a shifting in his posture that comes just as easily as that of his body. With a leg positioned in front of his other he raises a metaphorical eyebrow before chuckling, deeply and perhaps a tad darkly for even his liking; but it conveyed a sense of amusement. “A fallen God.” he commented, recalling the stories of Yidhra and her past, of the things she’d spun well into and through his and his siblings’ heads.
“Ancient and old; but not natural to Beqanna. She was born in body somewhere in another world, the child of bloodlines far longer living than even the concept of time. Gifted with wings and power she was stripped and collapsed to the earth; but it was there she found the Stone in a different world and the Stone offered her immortality if she would bring the shards together. She did. Elemmírë… she o’ the Hurricane the Primordium, and eventually the last known Keeper of the Stone.”
He repeats it without reverence, simply a voice of facts, his words nonchalant. “It killed the world she came from, she caused the apocalypse, and when she freed herself from the bonds of the Stone she found herself here. Carnage opened the heart of Pangea and she was reborn in it: made his child. And I? I am merely the son she brought into this world- child of Yidhra… as she calls herself now, and Ivar.”
Twitching an ear at the names, he shrugs: his body shifting and joints popping as the addendums fall from him and Nodens resumes a normalized form… a body completely equine and painted with large patches of white spattered by grey and brown… snowflaked with a white or gray varnish. His hazel-red eyes focusing on Narcisa. “A shifter, but, not bound to any form. No matter, I am after all mortal, and the tales of Gods and Legends matter little in a place where magic goes unchecked.”
“What God made you, Narcisa?” he chuckles: truly curious.
